Oh the Irony: Lord McAlpin tweeter George Monbiot bemoans bias

Our brief correspondence on Twitter caused me to wonder why it is that Media Lens, a project whose purpose is to engage and persuade progressive journalists by critiquing their work and encouraging people to write to them, so often seems to alienate and antagonise them…

While I love debate, I do not love receiving scores of almost identical messages from people who sound as if they haven’t thought through an issue for themselves, but are parroting a line – often the exact words – formulated by someone else… you often seem to ascribe to people the worst of all possible motives…

The third issue is what I perceive as confirmation bias: that you appear to have begun with a conclusion…then sought evidence to support it. Take your recent alert about the Guardian’s coverage of climate change. It seemed to me that you were cherry-picking a few lines of comment to support an otherwise unsupportable conclusion. I challenge you to conduct a comprehensive assessment..rather than just plucking out the items you disagree with, and seek to decide, as dispassionately as possible, whether or not it really conforms to the propaganda model.